My Debt Repayment Spreadsheet

Managing money isn’t always straight forward, and I can’t always get it done with a simple pen and paper. In fact, I’d say I use a lot of tools to keep my finances in order. There’s my no-fee chequing account with ING Direct, there’s my Mint.com account where I track my spending every month and generate gorgeous graphs to help me analyze my spending. I even use a pen and paper when working out my projected income calculations. But of all the things I use to keep track of my money, there’s nothing I love more than my spreadsheets.

My spreadsheets have gotten me through thick and thin, they helped me plan and track my debt repayment down to the last cent, and now they help me plan my future savings. If you haven’t already tried to use a spreadsheet to help your finances, I highly recommend you get started. Like yesterday. Seriously, go get Excel or start using Google Docs (it’s free!) right now.

If you want to use excel to start budgeting, my friend Cait over at Blonde on a Budget has a budget template all ready for you to try out. If you want a kick ass saving spreadsheet, Bridget from Money After Grad walks you through how to build one.

If you want a debt repayment spreadsheet, you’ve come to the right place. A few people have asked to see the spreadsheet I used to pay off my debts, so here you go!

If you’ve just downloaded it, it might look a little scary at first, but it’s really not that complicated. The debt repayment schedule (in this case my two debts) is on the left, and the details about your debts go on the right. Fill in the sections on the right with your debts to populate the fields on the left. In the example, I used my two starting debts from January 2013. Whatever you fill in as your debts should be the “opening balance” of your debts on the left. Whatever you fill in for “payments” should show up as your payments on the left, etc.

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Phase 1 and Phase 2 of Debt Repayment

On the right you’ll notice sections called Phase 1 and Phase 2. This is simply which debt is being focused on first. In Phase 1, I directed all of my cash towards my student loans, and made the minimum payments on my car loan. In July I paid off my student loans and started Phase 2, so I wasn’t making any payments on my student loans, and instead I was pushing all of my cash towards my second debt. If you have more than one debt or are using the debt snowball method, you might find have phase 1 and phase 2 very helpful. I know I did.

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Accounting for Extra Payments

Another reason I made this spreadsheet is because you can customize every single month’s debt repayment. You have the opportunity to put in a regular payment on the right, but if there’s ever a month where you expect to make extra payments, you can fill it in directly in the timeline. For example, in March I got a tax return of $3,000, so I wanted to add that to my debt repayment.

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Since I was doing a lot of freelance writing, I really liked being able to add in expected extra income. I found that most debt repayment calculators only allowed you to input a single, static monthly payment. For someone who is pushing every windfall and extra cent towards debt, that wasn’t nearly flexible enough for me.

After A Month Has Passed

At the end of every month, I would delete most of the cells and just leave the end-of-month debt total. The spreadsheet itself only goes for one year, but you can easily duplicate the cells to carry forward several years.

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This is the exact spreadsheet I used to pay off my debt in 24 months. It isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, it doesn’t produce graphs or pie charts, but it sure got the job done and enabled me to track how much interest I was paying on my multiple debts, when I would become debt free, and all of those little extra payments that add up over time.

I hope you get some use out of it, and if you have any questions at all about how to use it, feel free to send me a message on Facebook, tweet at me on Twitter, or drop me an email through my contact page.

Stay Up To Date

Awesome spreadsheet, Jordann! And a great resource to offer. I loved when Bridget did that savings spreadsheet, because for people that aren’t so spreadsheet-inclined, it can be really daunting to try to set up. Same with this debt-repayment one!

I had the same trouble with the windfall money and how to account for it with an online calculator. And since I was already a spreadsheet-fiend, it made sense to make my own. Yours is a little prettier than mine, but I do the same thing… at the end of the month I simplify it down to the actual rather than projected, and continue on.

That’s why I made mine too, I couldn’t find an online calculator that could handle multiple debts, when to switch over to a second debt when the first one was paid, and varying payment amounts. PLUS this one shows your interest charge per day, which I find extremely motivating. 🙂 Glad you liked it!

anexactinglife

The charts and graphs in Excel and Google Sheets are not that bad; you can highlight the range of data you want to include, and then click on Insert and then Charts (or an Excel Pivot Table if you want to get fancy). Needless to say I love spreadsheets, too!

Jordann, Thank you so much for this spreadsheet. I’ve added many more columns and have everything *almost* working, but I’m lost on the “total debt cleared overall”. what exactly are you calculating there? Thank you!

I know this post is a little old, but I just wanted to say how much I love using this spreadsheet! I tweaked it a little for our mortgage payments, but it really gives us a good sense of the interest we’re paying each month. I also love how you incorporated extra payments as this is something we’re trying to make every couple months and it’s so motivating to see how much of a difference it makes!

Keep up the great work! 🙂

bigazonk

Did anyone notice the excel calculations errors?! I stumbled across this spreadsheet and it seems to be exactly what I was looking for. I downloaded it and have been adding my own info, so I’m double checking my calculations with a calculator as I go to make sure I copies the formulas correctly, and noticed excel is not doing it correctly.

For example: Debt #2 – to calculate total interest charges for the month of January, it takes cells B6*B7 ($1.03*31). Excel gives an answer of $31.99 when it’s actually $31.93. Although it’s only $0.06, clearly when we got here trying to tackle a significant amount of debt, these calculations off by a couple cents on each debt over months and years will definitely add up.

A quick google search lead me to a setting under the advanced options to “set precision as displayed” which corrected the formulas. Definitely weird and doesn’t make sense to have this issue to begin with. I could see if perhaps it was multiple calculations with several decimals spots, but this is a fairly straight forward calculation that shouldn’t trip excel up!

Anyway, thanks for the spreadsheet! Once I figured that out and tweaked it to my liking, it’s great!!!!

I'm a part time runner, yogi, local foodie and personal finance aficionado. I blog about handling money as a debt ridden millennial. [read more]

My Money Facts

Starting Debt: $37,987.65Current Debt: $0.00
I paid off my original debt in just 24 months.